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March 25, 2014 - Child Care Payment Update

3/25/2014

Child care providers offer a vital service for working parents and we know how critical it is for them to receive payments from the state on a regular basis. We at IDHS are taking extraordinary measures to expedite the payments that were delayed as a result of the switch to the new Child Care Management System launched on January 14, 2014, and to keep providers informed on the progress of payments. We are also working hard on correcting payment errors that have occurred in recent weeks. We continue to see progress in correcting those errors. In some cases, payments to home providers had union dues/fair share deductions calculated incorrectly. Some payments withheld too much and some payments did not withhold enough. DHS has begun to correct those errors with payments that are processed beginning this week.

IDHS and Action for Children now have a special Hotline to call for Cook County providers who are facing financial hardship due to delayed payments. The number is 877-581-3691. The hotline is staffed by Action for Children.

To find out when your payment was entered, you can use 800-804-3833. That number will usually tell of approval of a payment the working day following the approval, and generally will tell about issue of a payment two working days after the issue. Licensed providers must enter the IVR case numbers to hear information on their payments. Pleases refer to the most recent child care certificate or other child care case information for the IVR number.

For this program, we draw our Federal Child Care funds in the middle of the month each month which allows us to approve and issue the majority of the payments. Many payments have been approved by DHS and issued by The Office of the Comptroller recently. Some of the payments entered up to March 20th should be approved by DHS on March 24th. More payments should become approved by DHS later this week.

However, there are still payments entered with much earlier entry days that have not been approved by DHS because of some technical issues. A plan is being put in place that will get many of these payments approved. The process to fix the technical issue is fairly complicated. It appears many of those payments may be able to be approved sometime this week, but we haven't been able to confirm that yet.

**For issued payments, many payments approved by DHS on 3/20 were issued by The Office of the Comptroller on Friday night March 21st. More payments should be issued throughout this week.

We realize there are some isolated problems with approved and issued payments lately that did not calculate correctly. We are working to identify why the problems are occurring and hope to have a resolution and a reimbursement process soon.

The child care payment process is 3 Steps. Your payment is entered into the child care system, when funding is available, and the system has no errors the payment is approved by DHS. After the payment is approved, generally the payment will be issued by The Office of the Comptroller 1-3 working days after the approval. Paper checks are mailed the next working day after being issued. Direct Deposit and debit card payments are in accounts 2 working days after issue.